


Best and Brightest

by ADashOfStarshine (ADashOfInsanity)



Series: The Terrors of Tin Street Series [2]
Category: Magic: The Gathering
Genre: Backstory, M/M, Ties in with "The Terrors of Tin Street"
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-30
Updated: 2019-05-30
Packaged: 2020-03-30 00:41:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19031257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ADashOfInsanity/pseuds/ADashOfStarshine
Summary: Cuddled up with Tomik on a rainy day, Ral considers Mr and Mrs Vrona's desire to meet his parents. There's just one problem with that - they're in prison for a set of experiments that ended many innocent lives.A Ral Zarek backstory fic featuring cute Ral/Tomik times.





	Best and Brightest

**Author's Note:**

> This story is meant as a companion fic to "The Terrors of Tin Street", where Ral appears many times but doesn't really want to share his backstory. If you want to know who Dr Marian is, check out that fic!  
> Otherwise, this can be read as a stand alone piece.

Ral let out a little groan, leaning his head against the soft white fleece of his boyfriend’s dressing gown. Tomik shifted a little, allowing him a better view of the book Ral had totally not been reading over his shoulder for the last fifteen minutes. He smiled and combed his fingers through static-strewn air with an affection that belied his own huff.

“Something’s bothering you,” he said, setting the book on his lap with his free hand.  Ral let out a discontented ‘hmph’ but leaned into the soft petting of his hair.

“You know I’ll get it out of you one way or another,” Tomik told him, “I’m not above a little extortion, especially  if I think you’re unhappy.”

“Of course you aren’t, sneaky Orzhov,” Ral mumbled into his pyjamas, “Sneaky Orzhov with horrendously rich generous parents.”

“Is that what this is about?”

Tomik’s hand stilled in his hair. He was about to complain when he realised he knew very well how to get him to continue. Extortion indeed.

“Your parents bought us an entire kitchen without blinking an eye,” Ral exclaimed, too tired to make much of a racket but he wanted his frustration to be known, “An entire kitchen! And it’s a fancy-ass kitchen too.”

“Where you make very fancy-ass breakfasts for their adoring son,” Tomik replied. Ral could help but snort a little at his own language making its way into his boyfriend’s rather refined vocabulary.

“Yes, but an entire kitchen,” Ral continued, “With lights and integrated everything, and an oven that’s nicer than my entire lab at Nivix. How am I ever supposed to live up to that?

“It’s a gift,” Tomik stated, resuming his attentions to Ral’s grey streaks, “You don’t have to live up to that. They love you. Though…” He hesitated for a moment.

“I bet they would love you more if they got to meet your parents.”

Ral pulled a face, a scowl that even gentle petting couldn’t assuage. As always, Tomik had managed to get to the heart of the problem with only a few questions. Stupid adovkist. How had he ended up with a lover, who was not only the most gorgeous man on Ravnica, but also the only non-telepathic mind reader he knew? It wasn’t fair sometimes.

“My parents are in prison Tomik,” he reminded him, “I’m pretty sure my ma is dead. She knifed another woman, remember? The Boros aren’t going to let her get away with that.”

“That doesn’t mean my parents wouldn’t want to meet them,” Tomik replied lightly, “If anything, they’d be even more impressed at how wonderful you turned out.”

“No thanks to them,” Ral muttered, “Or the gods-damn Boros.”

Zarek was a name Ral had chosen for himself when he re-joined the Izzet League. He couldn’t face going back to the guild with his parents' name and all the social stigma that would come with it. He refused to let himself be defined by their legacy. Sure, they had been successful researchers in their time. Their invention of the Portable Translocational High-Energy Beam Splitter had changed the face of field research. Ral had used one himself to destroy multiple samples in one shot. However, their intentions had never been to destroy surplus samples, or even to drill very precise holes in large machinery – the two uses for the portable splitter most commonly utilised today. No, they worked away in the dead of night, weaponizing the damn thing from the comfort of their guild-sponsored lab. Ral had seen the place they worked, a domed room as tall as a cathedral, the tiled floor still charred by the remains of countless test-subjects who had fallen victim to their ‘calibrations’. There were still scuffs on the tiles where heavily armoured and injured subjects had tried to drag themselves away from the oncoming lasers. The whole room was one carefully monitored death trap. He was shocked the Izzet had spent so long in ignorance of what they were doing. He’d been eleven when the Boros finally came and turned over their home. Later, when he was old enough to go through the Izzet archives, he had learned why. His parents had started to run out of willing test subjects, so they simply hired some roughs to ‘find’ some more.  One such victim was the daughter of a Boros officer, bringing the entire force of the Legion down on a singular lab.

Did he think his parents deserved to go to jail? Yes, of course. Should they be locked away forever for their hideous mistreatment of human life? Definitely.  However, had his terrified eleven-year-old self deserved to be chained up and treated like a criminal? Did he deserve to be rough-housed all the way back to the precinct lock up? Thrown in the back of a cell, like a sack of potatoes, and left to cry there, alone, confused and hurt as huge soldiers yelled and stomped about him? Fuck no.  

He was a kid. He was innocent. He had no idea what his parents got up to in their hell dome. He’d just gone to school like an ordinary child, being taken there and back by the babysitter his parents hired when they were too busy with work. He’d come home that day, ready to do his homework and go to bed, when suddenly he was being tossed about by huge men with armour and swords. He’d cried, kicked, yelled - what did they expect? A terrified child to not wail for help? But no, they took this as a sign of resisting arrest, they trussed him up like a bird for the roast and shut him away in a cell full of ice and muck.

Ral was in there for a week, begging his captors for food, water, or any sign of where his parents may be. When a pair of guards in slightly fancier uniform came to untie him, he thought he was finally free. But no, they marched him across a large courtyard and into the barracks. There he was left in a place that still haunted his nightmares.

It was the unimaginatively named “Halls of Future Glory: Correctional Institution for the Learning, Betterment and Discipline of Future Generations.” A joint venture between the Azorius and Boros to rip the children of the condemned away from their parents and brainwash them into perfect little soldiers.  If the Boros got your parents, you’d be beaten into the shape of an officer. If the Azorius got you, well, hope you liked being lawfully caned.

Ral refused. Refused to stand before the sunburst fist and chant the glories of Guildmaster Aurelia. Refused to salute his ‘commanding officers’. Refused to back down when one of said officers brought a whip out on a sobbing five year old boy. None of the children in his troop had ever done anything wrong. They sobbed and begged, crying out for their mothers, fathers, aunts and uncles, grandparents, for anyone and everyone to come save them from this torture. Even at eleven years old, Ral could see that this was not right, this was not ‘just’. This was another glorified prison. Just with more running around in circles, being shouted at by guards.

He hated them. He hated the officers. He hated the guards. He hated anyone who thought they could boss around exhausted and petrified children. He threw his food in the face of a guard and got told to stand in the corner for the rest of the allotted meal time. He denied the order, spitting in the man’s face. 

The wrath of the guards came down fast. He was seized by both arms and dragged kicking and screaming into an adjacent room. The guard with the whip, the same officer he’d kicked to stop him hurting a younger boy, was summoned. They tore the shirt off Ral’s back as Ral cussed and spat at the men like a child possessed.

Then he felt it. As the whip struck his bare skin, he felt his hatred turn into power, raw and unrestrained. He screamed in pain, not from the bloody gash between his shoulder blades but from the lightning that coursed through his body like the mightiest beam splitter of all.  His scream transformed into a roar. With an almighty mental shove, he willed the energy out, out of his body, out of his spasming limbs and into the room around him.  The officers around him yelled as lightning danced up their metal breastplates, jerking erratically as Ral spared them one last look.

The lightning.

It wanted to take him somewhere.

He had no choice but to let it transport him as he promptly passed out cold.

He woke up in a medical bay. For a moment he panicked and thought he was back in the barracks. However, this room was much cleaner, much greener, than anywhere in he’d seen in the correctional facility. As he sat up, a tall elven woman in a long green dress hastened over to his bedside. She had a golden name-badge fastened to the front of her uniform, declaring her to be Doctor Alana.

“Sleep child,” she assured him, “You’re safe here.”

“Where am I?” Ral had asked her.

“You’re at the Heroes’ Rest. We are a large hospital that attends to Valor’s Reach.  Please, sleep. You’ve been through quite the ordeal but I’ll answer all your questions in due time.”

He’d never heard of anywhere called Valor’s Reach. As he took in the beautiful hospital bay, a sinking feeling told him he was unfathomably far from home. The Heroes’ Rest was full of plant life, including hanging baskets full of beautiful electric-blue flowers unlike any he’d seen in the parks around the Tenth District.  It didn’t take him long, after a few careful questions to Doctor Alana, to realise that he wasn’t in Ravnica at all. This was a new world, a new world called Kylem where those blue flowers bloomed as readily as pansies in a Ravnican front garden.

“Oh these?” Doctor Alana said as he asked after them.

“These are Zarek flowers. Do you not have them at home?”

He grew restless in the hospital, vanishing in a crackle of energy as soon as he felt his strength return. Willing himself to think of home, he ended up a few doors down from his parent’s house, which had been fenced off with metal railings. Determined not to end up back under arrest, he abandoned the neighbourhood entirely. People would recognise him there. He’d rather take his chances on the streets than head back to that prison.

Better than hell, he told himself as he wandered the streets of the Tenth. Better than slavery. Better than being a beaten into a soulless agent of authority. Out here he made his own rules. He decided what he did, what he ate, when he woke up and when he went to bed. No authority could catch him, and if they tried, well they would get a face full of lightning. The Boros officers got warm clothing, beds and regular food, but he had freedom. He could go wherever he wanted. He knew what was best for himself. No one would ever tell him what to do. He desperately tried to convince himself of the joys of his situation as he sheltered from the rain in yet another dingy back alley. He was cold, he was hungry, but he was at least free.

  Growing up on the streets of Ravnica required quick thinking and a good sense of when to duck. Skirting round other Izzet neighbourhoods, Ral learned there was good money to be had in scrap metal.  It was slim pickings around those parts, so he ventured further afield, scavenging through rubbish heaps, industrial dumpsters and even the waste disposal chutes that led down into the Undercity. He followed round travelling fun fairs, collecting loose parts that came off their decrepit old rides.  When not digging for scrap, he would observe the artificers coming in and out of the Smelting District, the technology strapped around their person giving him ideas for his own use.  His first gauntlets were nothing but wire and cables, but they helped him channel his lightning at a much greater accuracy. He raided a scrap heap in the Undercity, full of the unsold possessions of the dead. There he found a promising looking set of pipes, a dial of some kind and more importantly, a lot of scrap mizzium. Enough to exchange for all the parts he needed for a proper wrist-bound conduit.

At sixteen, fortune finally decided he’d had too many kicks in the teeth, and decided to give him something nice for a change. He was skulking round the back of an alley off Tin Street where he saw two minotaurs having an argument. One was very clearly Boros, her tunic striped red and white, emblazoned with that hated sun-fist. The other minotaur however, had coils wrapped round her horns and the Izzet logo proudly emblazoned across the canisters strapped to her back. Ral had never seen an Izzet minotaur before, neither had the Boros one apparently. The two argued about honour and proprietary, the Boros claiming that the Izzet was a shame to her line. The two women got increasingly irate at each other and it looked like they were about to come to blows. Feeling suddenly very patriotic, Ral decided to stand up for the rights of the Izzet lady. Why shouldn’t a minotaur want to run a lab? Invention was for everyone! Even someone like him could throw a device or two together. Who did this stupid Boros think she was?

As the Boros minotaur hefted her mace, Ral leapt out from his position behind the bins. He shot a bolt of energy at the heavy metal weapon, causing to glow fiercely before hitting the ground with a loud thud. The Boros reeled in pain, clutching at her singed hand. She swore loudly, rounding on Ral who stood awkwardly in the centre of the alley, wondering what he was supposed to do next. The Boros’ injured hand suddenly glowed with a bright white light. She pointed at him and he took an apprehensive step back.

“Stay out of this street rat! Piss off before I reduce you to ash.”

Ral did not take orders from anyone, including rude-ass officers!

“I’d like to see you try old lady!” he retorted, “I won’t let anyone bully members of my guild!”

She ground her teeth. Her hand glowed brighter before she released a surge of energy at him, blazing white hot in the darkness of the back street. Almost on instinct, Ral took another step back, throwing an arc of lightning between himself and the light-ball. There was an explosion as the two magics met, rocking the nearby brickwork, causing rats to flee the surrounding garbage.  Ral however stepped out of the wreckage unharmed, gauntlets sparking in anger.

“This is Izzet territory, get out!” he shouted.

The Boros officer growled low in her throat. Ral prepared himself for another ball of energy when suddenly a loud ‘thunk’ echoed off the stone walls. The Boros minotaur fell like a sack of bricks, blood spilling from her head. Behind her, the Izzet woman held her dropped mace in shaking gauntlets.  She promptly dropped it, causing a small clang as it hit her opponent on the breastplate.

“Thank you,” she breathed, her breath frenzied from panic, “You’re going to want to get out of here hon, before anyone finds her.”

“Are you ok?” Ral asked.

She shrugged.

“We’ll see. Come on. Let’s go back to my lab. You look half-starved. Let me at least fix you something up to say thank you.”

Ral owed so much to Dr Marian. Not only did she give him a place in her lab, but he was allowed to sleep on her sofa when he was between rooms. Without her, he’d never have got the paperwork to officiate his guild membership. She trained him in all the machinery and tools he now used every day. Together, they opened up her lab to the public, analysing any device that crossed their threshold.  Not since his parent’s arrest had he had someone looking out for him. He certainly hadn’t celebrated his birthday since then. During his first year in the lab, they baked a cake in the moulding oven and added homemade fireworks in place of candles. The resulting mess was enormous but delicious. Later she would help him apply for his scholarship at Dragon’s Perch – the most prestigious guild academy of them all.  The timing was lucky for him. The troubles at Mizzium House started just after he received the results of his entry exams. (A new record, still not beaten, thank you very much.)  His scholarship was guaranteed even as Dr Marian’s future looked so uncertain.

“Don’t worry about me,” she told him as he sat in her kitchen, watching the Steam Festival fireworks through the window, “You go out there and be amazing hon. You’ll be the best in Nivix before you know it.”

She was right. He proudly graduated the top of his year. After attempting to drown his regrets in cocktails, he thought of her as his drunken classmates lifted him above their shoulders, parading their genius around for all to see. He’d searched the district high and low. After looking through every lab directory and guild registry to find where she’d ended up, he was unable to deliver his invite. He hoped, somehow, that she might have heard about his graduation and turn up anyway. His friends had invited their parents, but he’d had no one to hug or offer a handkerchief to.  He stood alone in his ceremony of honour, presented with the Firemind’s Medal of  Excellence for his perfect dissertation. _This is for you Doctor,_ he thought, before heading straight for the student bar.

In light of his award, he shot up the guild faster than a mizzium powered rocket. Ricocheting from one victory to another, he found himself at the right claw of Niv Mizzet himself. Guildmage, Head-Researcher and then, though the dragon had little to say in the matter, Izzet Mazerunner. He single handedly built a device for tracking planeswalkers – perhaps the only one of its kind in the multiverse! Ok, maybe he’d had some help from Jace-fucking-Beleren, but Project Lightning Bug had his name all over it.

He was going to be mad at Jace Beleren forever. He understood the man was an overpowered yet anxious mess but he was still annoying. Especially due to the fact that, if it wasn’t for Jace Beleren, he’d never have seen Dr Marian again. Jace had employed her in the Guildpact offices as part of his inter-guild investigation bureau. In fact, she ran the entire lab, identifying and disassembling any dangerous artefacts that were acquired from cross-guild crime scenes. More than a few handkerchiefs were required for their reunion. Ral blamed Jace entirely for the humiliation of crying in front of a whole lab of researchers.

In fact, because of that, he was giving Dr Marian all the credit for the fact he’d also met a particular someone at the Guildpact offices too.

“What are you thinking about?” asked Tomik. It seemed Ral’s hair was finally the way he wanted it – stuck up in every single direction due to his residual static.

“History,” Ral replied, “Stuff.”

“My parents won’t mind if they don’t get to meet yours,” Tomik consoled him, clearly thinking Ral’s long silence had been about that. Ral shook his head.

“I haven’t really met them for a long time either,” he explained, “Like I said, I think my Ma is gone but…It’d be odd you know, walking in, going: Hi Da, guess who’s the master of the Guild that kicked you out all those years ago. Also, here’s my smoking hot boyfriend and his ghost parents.”

Tomik chuckled.

“That would certainly be a lot.”

“I don’t need him,” Ral sighed, “Haven’t needed him in years. Got all the family I need right here.”

He raised his head to give Tomik a quick kiss on the cheek. Once again displaying his uncanny mind-reading powers, Tomik met him halfway, pressing their lips together with a smile.

“Hm, I certainly think you’ll make an excellent Zarek-Vrona.”

Ral found himself blushing at the thought. _Zarek-Vrona._ Yes, he liked the sound of that. He’d always thought double barrelled surnames were a bit excessive, but then again, nothing was too excessive for his silk-clad Orzhov lover.

“Your parents are going to be unbearable when we get married,” he murmured, finally achieving the cheek kiss he’d been aiming for.

“They’ll insist on paying for everything, it’ll be awful,” Tomik quipped, “Including the most gorgeous suit for you. Tails and everything. Maybe even a corset.”

“You’d like that wouldn’t you.”

Ral pulled a face and Tomik could help but laugh. Cuddling up on the sofa, they listened to the rain steadily drumming on the windows to their apartment. Ral wondered what eleven-year-old him, locked away in that holding cell, would have thought if he’d known that after all the pain he’d end up the Guildmaster of the Izzet. With a home of his own, a lover who adored him and a family to boot. He’d probably want to know how his older self had built a time machine, but apart from that, well, he probably wouldn’t believe it.  Ravnica was a rough place and the guilds were never perfect. But right here, right now? His future was the best and brightest it had ever been.


End file.
